Doubtless the fall stunned me; but doubtless also not for more than a few seconds.  For I awoke to the drum of distant hoofs, and before it died clean away I had recovered sense enough to take its bearing in the direction of Farnham.  Strangely enough, towards Alton all was quiet.  Sitting up, with both hands pressing my head, for just a moment I recognised the gallop for my own mare’s.  Another beat time with it.  I asked myself, why another?  She would be heading for home—­wounded, perhaps—­scared certainly.  But why with a companion? . . .  Then, suddenly, I remembered the poor pack-beast; and as I remembered him, all my faculties grew clouded.

Or so, at least, I must suppose; for of the sudden silence on the Alton road I thought not at all.  What next engaged me was a feeling of surprise that, of my two hands pressed on my temples, the right was cold, but the left, though it met the wind, unaccountably warm—­ the wrist below it even deliciously, or so it felt until rubbing my palms together I found them sticky, with blood.

The blood, I next discovered, was welling from a cut on my left temple.  Putting up my fingers, I felt the fresh flow running over a crust of it frozen on my cheek; and wondered how I might stanch it.  I misdoubted my strength to find the lane again and creep down to the river; and the river, moreover, would be frozen.  For a certainty I should freeze to death where I lay, and even more surely on the road back to Farnham I must faint and drop and, dropping, be frozen.  With that, I remembered the light we had seen shining ahead of us as we crossed the fields; and staggered along in search of it, after first groping for my morion, which had rolled into the hedge some paces away.

For a while, confused in my bearings, I sought on the wrong hand; but by-and-by caught the twinkle of it through a gate to the left, and studied it, leaning my arms on the bar.  The house whence it shone could not be any part of Holibourne village, but must stand somewhere on high rising ground across the valley.  I might reckon to reach it by turning back and taking the lane in which we had been surprised:  but this meant fetching a long circuit.  I was weakening with loss of blood, and—­it coming into my mind that the river below would be hard—­I resolved to steer a straight line and risk obstacles.

As it turned out, there were none, or none to throw me back.  At the stream-side, holding by an elder-bough, I tested the ice with my weight, proved it firm, crossed without so much as cracking it, and breasted a bare grassy slope, too little to be called a down, where a few naked hawthorns chafed and creaked in the wind.  Above it was an embankment rounded like a bastion, up the left side of which I crept—­or, you might almost say, crawled—­and, reaching the top, found myself close under the front of a dwelling-house.